Evelyn Jorgenson

FILE -- Evelyn Jorgenson (NWA Democrat-Gazette/ANDY SHUPE)
FILE -- Evelyn Jorgenson (NWA Democrat-Gazette/ANDY SHUPE)

If you stroll through Burns Hall on the Northwest Arkansas Community College campus on any given weekday, you'll see a microcosm of the community: A mosaic of ages, nationalities, ethnicities. Lively conversations and laughter. Students exchanging books and notes with each other.

It's one of the things NWACC President Evelyn Jorgenson loves most about the demographics of a community college.

Through Others’ Eyes

“She is such a caring person, for all different types of things. She has a hard time saying no and is involved in all kinds of work outside the college. She works with the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank, and one of the things that she worked with when she was in northern Missouri is the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women — she directed the first one held in Moberly. She just wants to help people.” — Carl Jorgenson

“She’s given me an example of what I want to be. I try every day to be the best qualified person in this poosition, and she has given me compelling and wonderful guideposts through which to do that.” — Megan Bolinder

Next Week

Carlotta LaNier

Little Rock

"Four-year universities are different from community colleges -- oftentimes, you get a much more homogeneous group of students, and you don't necessarily get a good cross-section that is more representative of the real world," says Jorgenson, who took the position as president in 2013. "That's the beauty of community college.

"And I love that we have great diversity of age in our classes. If you take, for example, a whole classroom full of 18- or 19-year-olds and try to talk to them about the Gulf War, they don't remember that. But if you get into a community college classroom, you very likely will have veterans that served in that war. You'll certainly have people that remember that, and they'll be able to tell real life stories that make that learning come to life. This makes for a much richer learning environment."

If Jorgenson sounds like a cheerleader for community colleges, it's because she is. Her first degree was from a community college, and she has been a fan ever since.

Agriculture to education

Jorgenson describes herself as a "little farm girl" when she grew up in tiny Koeltztown, Mo., in southern Osage County. Her parents had a 450-acre farm, which, as a child, Jorgenson helped tend.

"A lot of it was gathering the eggs, feeding the chickens, bringing the cows up to milk, that's probably the most of it," she recalls. Her father was an iron worker as well as a farmer. "Looking back on it, I think about how hard Dad worked, because farming by itself was hard work. He would work at the steel plant and then come home and farm into the evening until he was working by the lights on the tractor. Farming was important to him."

Her family -- including Jorgenson and three younger siblings -- moved to Sedalia, Mo., when she was 10 years old. She graduated from high school and went on to the local State Fair Community College. It was there that Jorgenson discovered she had a passion for teaching adults.

"I actually started teaching adult basic education at State Fair as a volunteer," she says. "I was always a good student, and I always learned well. I was a little bit surprised that there were people who didn't graduate from high school. I didn't really know any better. I was surprised that so many people had so much trouble learning. So I would go into the adult basic education program and volunteer and just help people."

It proved to be an eye-opening experience that would inform her future career track.

"There were a lot of stories about why they weren't able to finish," she says. "Ironically, they are some of the same reasons we see here at the community college. They have to work. They can't take time to go to school. A lot of family issues, life issues. Homelessness. All kinds of things where people were just struggling with life.

"You have to really have some basic necessities before you can turn your attention to learning in a school environment -- if you're sleeping on the streets, if you don't have food, if you got beat up because your dad was drunk the night before. The thing that was interesting is that [almost all] of those students had so much more potential than they realized. Some of them grew up in an environment where they were always told they were stupid. I always felt like any success we could help them with so that they could see how capable they were of learning was going to serve them well -- they needed that knowledge to have the courage to go on and learn more.

"I really enjoyed it, and I was good at it. It was easy for me to empathize."

After earning her associate's degree, Jorgenson took a year off before starting school at Columbia College in Columbia, Mo. -- a private college. After that, she would seek out her master's degree and her Ph.D. in higher education leadership at the University of Missouri.

"I tell people that I have tasted all the flavors of higher education -- community college, private college and big four-year universities," she says with a smile.

Jorgenson taught for a few years, including art classes -- utilizing her bachelor's degree in fine arts -- and adult basic education and remedial courses.

"Not everyone can teach remedial courses," she says. "Some instructors prefer to work with students that don't struggle so much with the basics. But I enjoyed that. I enjoyed seeing that lightbulb come on for the very first time."

Administration

When Jorgenson was asked to temporarily fill in for the director of the school where she was teaching, she almost immediately discovered an affinity for working in administration.

"I came to realize I could work well with other faculty members," she says. "I could lead, I could accomplish things that needed to be done for the benefit of the students, for the benefit of the program. I thought, 'I like this role. I like being here to help faculty do the things they need to do and to assist them so that they can help their students in the best way possible.'"

She took a job at Moberly Area Community College in Missouri as the assistant to the president in 1986. By 1996, she was president of the college.

"The interesting thing about that was that, in 1996, when I was named president -- this was a very gutsy, progressive board of trustees, and I'm very appreciative of them -- not only did they hire a newbie, who had not been a president of a college before, but I was also the only female community college president in the state of Missouri in 1996."

She would serve for 17 years as president at Moberly, and, she says, she could have retired there.

"I had a great board of trustees," she says. "But I told my husband, 'You know, I kind of think I want one more big adventure. I kind of think I've set out to do everything I've set out to do so far, but I want another adventure.' By then, he was retired, and he said, 'Well, wherever we go, they had better have good golf courses.'"

Jorgenson also says she was looking for a placement that would keep her relatively close to her children, who live in Kansas City, and her mother in Lake of the Ozarks. Northwest Arkansas satisfied all of those requirements.

Todd Kitchen is a member of the president's cabinet and was part of the team that selected the new president for NWACC.

""I have served the college as the vice president for student services for nearly six years, so I knew during the interview process that I was interacting with someone who would potentially be my boss," says Kitchen. "What has been so good about working with Dr. Jorgenson is that her focus, sense of mission and values as presented during her interview are exactly what we have experienced since she assumed her role as president at NWACC. She takes work seriously and is very engaged across her college community."

Kitchen wasn't the only faculty member on whom Jorgenson made an immediate impression. Megan Bolinder is NWACC's dean of Communication and Arts.

"Faculty spend years and years in graduate school so they can be considered experts in their field by the time they're finished with their higher degrees," says Bolinder. "They have strong opinions. And I'm sharing that to tell you that one of the first things Dr. Jorgenson did was after one of our forums that we have the first week back to school -- this is the forum that everyone from the college comes to -- she held a 'Q and A with Dr. J.' And I found that incredibly, delightfully brave, because she was opening herself up to a potential den of vipers, which faculty can be sometimes, especially in moments of transition, when opinions are strong. She was walking into something bravely, and she did it with what I have come to see are her guiding principles as a leader: She has decorum, she is accessible, she is committed to civility and excellence, and she doesn't waver from the things that she sees as important. But she is always eager to listen."

Jorgenson wasn't joking when she said she was ready for some new challenges, and she certainly hasn't shied away from them at NWACC. Though she has been in her position for only four years, she has an impressive list of accomplishments to show for that small amount of time.

"The financial condition of this college was not as strong as the college that I had left the previous year," she says. "They had dipped into the reserves and were deficit spending. I thought stabilizing the finances was very important."

Kitchen says that Jorgenson's most successful accomplishments include bringing the college back to financial health "which resulted in pay increases for faculty and staff without raising tuition for the past several years."

She also has two showy new programs to celebrate: a new construction technology program and Brightwater: a Center for the Study of Food, for which Jorgenson credits the Walton Family Foundation. NWACC has also expanded several of its programs during Jorgenson's tenure. She says all of these advances were made through collaboration and communication with members of the Northwest Arkansas community, which is a major tenet of Jorgenson's educational philosophy.

"I have said for decades that, as a community college, our middle name is 'community' -- and we've got to listen to the community," she says. "We've got to relate to community. A perfect example of that is when a contractor came to us and said, 'You know, we can't find carpenters, we can't find roofers, we can't find sheet rock handlers. We're trying to build all of these things, the area is growing, and we need construction workers.' We understood that and paid attention. We went through the process of getting that degree program approved, and we allowed them to help us shape the curriculum, rather than saying to them, 'OK, we're the educator, we're going to put it all together and tell you what you need to know.' Instead, we said, 'You work in the field, you tell us what you think.' Community education is at its best when it's a collaborative effort, when it's meeting community needs and when it's providing an education that's going to have an immediate payoff and some long-term opportunities."

Brightwater was borne out of a conversation with community members who wanted to elevate the area's culinary offerings. Jorgenson is currently looking for ways for the HVAC program to expand after builders expressed a need for an increase in HVAC technicians to keep up with the area's boom in building. A quorum court judge impressed upon NWACC the need for more paramedics, so that program was further developed.

"We have an institution that really listens to the community," she says. "A university might prepare someone for a career anywhere in the country or the world, but a community college is all about the community."

And Jorgenson is just beginning. If her tenure is as long at NWACC as it was at Moberly, the mind boggles at what she might accomplish. Members of her faculty seem excited at the prospects.

"Her consistent, steadfast focus on 'keeping the main thing the main thing'" is one of the aspects of Jorgenson's personality that facilitates her successes as an administrator, says Kitchen. "For us, the main thing is the success of our students, faculty and staff alike. Dr. Jorgenson not only believes in the mission of the college, she believes in the people that carry out that mission."

"She has provided an example of how you lead by principles and not by title or degrees," says Bolinder. "You lead by what you care about.

"It takes integrity."

NAN Profiles on 09/17/2017

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